Tivo vs MythTV (was: *pout* HDTV No Recordee....)

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 02:45 pm, Ben Scott wrote:
>   Those of you here who are already using MythTV, how do you find it
> works in day-to-day usage?

My wife and I use ours a lot, but there have been wrinkles.  If you intend to 
keep up with the latest versions, then backup often.  I find I have to go 
through at least a few headaches each time I set it up and every upgrade so 
far has been at least a little bit like setting it up the first time.  For 
what it's worth, I've always used KnoppMyth as the distro of choice to get 
things going.

However, if you get it up and running and just use it, it's highly reliable.  
I only try upgrades maybe once a year or so.  The rest of the time I have 
occasional lockups - maybe once every 2-3 months.  Somewhat common, the 
frontend crashes (never the backend really) and so restarting the frontend 
became commonplace enough that I tied my power button on my remote to a 
script that would start the frontend if it wasn't running.

And the problems I have could largely be due to cheap hardware - I've never 
been one to invest in consumer grade hardware much and I've replaced more 
motherboards than I care to think about in the last five years, always buying 
the cheapest I can find and putting the slowest processor I can buy in if I 
need a new one to fit the new motherboard.

My wife's not a computer geek.  She doesn't do Linux much, although she is 
technical in nature and so she appreciates all the cool stuff we can do with 
Myth.  She'd definitely be annoyed with me if it didn't work well, but she's 
proud to show it off when we have guests.  I figure that must count for 
something.
-N